Reality Check

I need to try & capture & remember that starry-eyed feeling that sets in when absolutely everything is new, the place where all of this has started. It so quickly fades as we order the world around us, correctly or not, into a workable view of reality. We make associations with the more familiar surroundings of back home, learn new location names & kinds of food & the occasional new action. But catching a jeepney is much the same as hailing a cab, you just have to learn the difference in paying for the first opposed to the second (& both would be new to this Midwest boy anyway.) Flushing with a bucket & balance are the only real differences in using a squat toilet & bucket showers are kind of fun once you get the hang of it. Its that overwhelming feeling of complete NEWNESS that is so special, so fleeting, so humbling & so easily forgotten. Go to a new job in the states, or move to a new city & the feelings are the same, only different in magnitude & duration. There are simply less new experiences (people, layout, the occasional acronym & slang) & the associations are made quicker (same culture & when it gets down to it, an office is still an office). But try that feeling for a week, two, longer. That’s the best comparison I can make to what life here is like. But now here I sit in the bake shop looking out the window at the Lamut Town Hall eating Halo Halo (shaved ice & a bunch of sweets in the bottom) & sure I might have ordered it wrong (I’m not really exactly sure how that was supposed to work) but I’m here, all by myself, working, writing & eating Halo Halo. Happy. Another successful transfer of reality. Its not quite a coffee shop, but it will work. Maybe cooking will be next, not that there was much to transfer in the 1^st place… :op